This is the E3 trailer (NSFW) for Need for Speed: The Run, the upcoming Cannonball Run/Gumball Rally-inspired installment in the Need for Speed series of racing games. The clip includes in-game footage and French captions, but it's easy enough to follow what's going on, and the voices in the gameplay footage are English, though this only comes into play in an odd out-of-car parkour sequence (maybe that's "the run" to which they refer?) that seems to consist of quicktime events. The clip is embedded below.

QTEs are the lowest form of interaction. So low that I don't think they even qualify as gameplay.

I think they work in some situations. Like a minigame in a children's game. That's about it. Lowest form.

I just don't get the scripting shown here. What if you avoid a car and don't get that cutscene? Is it scripted to be unavoidable? Then its logic is easily destroyed. I just can't see the illusion of chaos meshing with the control you need in a racing game.

I watched an interview of one of the devs trying to justify the existence of QTEs. I think it went something like this: "Before, players would race and then just watch a cinematic which would kill the intensity of the experience. But now the player is always in the action!"

Worst logic ever. If they thought cinematics were boring, they should have just removed them. This is a racing game. It doesn't need a story and therefore, it doesn't need cinematics. Also, adding occasional button prompts to a cinematic doesn't exactly make it a compelling experience. QTEs are the lowest form of interaction. So low that I don't think they even qualify as gameplay.

Isn't Need for Speed a driving/racing game? What's with the on foot movies and Quick Time Events that keep interrupting the driving?

I'm also finding it funny how the game is so ridiculously linear as well. Totally forgivable if it was just about driving around a track, but this whole game just looks like a long set of QTEs with portions of steering in between.

1) Shift, by Slightly Mad Studios - the serious NFS.2) Hot Pursuit, by Criterion - the "I'm not Burnout" NFS. I think a new Burnout is being made so who knows if this is on-going, but that's good, as I had more fun with the last Burnout I played (3) than the last NFS I played (Underground II)3) This, by Black Box - the "wtf, Gumball Rally is a sweet idea, but what happened?" NFS.

This uses DICE's engine, yet the cars still look so wrong to me, just like they did in Most Wanted. I really can't figure out what it is, but that game and this game are the only ones I've felt this in. Thinking it has to be that the cars seem to tall or not wide enough. Maybe too shiny. I'm not sure, but something about it is very off-putting to me and was in Most Wanted I/II.

Evil Timmy, NFS split into two brands a ways back. One gives you realistic sims that get great reviews, like Split, and the other gives you stuff like this. You anger over it no longer being like it was is funny when Shift is the closest to the originals that we've had in ages.

This looks like Most Wanted to me, in that something about the way the cars look on the road just looks off to me. I don't know if it's height or what...

I believe "The Run" they're talking about is how far EA can run this once-proud series into the ground, by diluting the name with whatever inane concept happened to seem good to the board of directors this year. They've clearly forgotten it, but the first game in the series was actually pre-titled "Road and Track presents", and it had videos of the cars, detailed info, and while having an arcadey physics model (because detailed real-time vehicle simulations were a ways off) it attempted to show the love people had for driving these vehicles in something approaching real-world scenarios. At least the games were about driving.

While the addition of Autolog is a nice feature, it seems like the developers are more focused on getting CoD-style RPG-lite addictiveness in every aspect, as opposed to providing a variety of tracks and improved driving feel. The QTEs...while I'm not a fan in general, at least games like Crysis 2 and The Witcher 2 make sense, in that the action you're performing matches what you're used to doing and is visually cued as such (ie it's clear you have to walk forward even without the blinking alert, so you use the walk control, or it's stabbity-time, so you use your normal attack key/button).

Not only do the controls in the QTEs have nothing to do with your normal racing, but the sequences themselves seem so over the top ridiculous that they must have come from the brain of Michael Bay in the midst of a multi-day coke-fueled rager. Even The Matrix didn't have Neo dropping seventy feet to a rooftop without slowing down, yet our purportedly-human protagonist does it without thinking and while dodging chaingun fire from a helicopter. The highly linear escape sequence (really? no choice of how to run?) certainly isn't about to change my impressions about the almost-criminal level of over-the-top dudebro action movie stupidity found in this trailer.